“It’s hard to feel a part of something when you’ve never met people”: defining “learning community” in an online era

Feeling part of a community of learners has been shown to foster students’ engagement and sense of belonging, leading to higher retention and achievement of learning outcomes. The pivot to online teaching caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted a reappraisal of all aspects of the student experience, including students’ capacity and opportunity to engage in meaningful learning communities online. There has been some emergent literature which considers how to facilitate online learning communities in the emergency remote teaching context prompted by COVID-19. However, there is a notable lack of literature which considers how learning communities are defined, understood, and negotiated by students in this unique teaching context. Given how students’ perceptions of learning communities contributes to Higher Education policy (e.g. through the National Student Survey), this is important to understand. In the present study (N = 309), we qualitatively investigated students’ understanding and definition of the term “learning community” during a time of emergency pivot to online teaching and learning. A reflexive thematic analysis of students’ first-hand responses generated three dominant themes: “Feeling connected: Bridging the gap whilst physically distanced”, “Feeling included: Visible and valued”, and “Feeling together: Mutuality and the shared experience”. We discuss the implications for these conceptualisations of an online learning community and suggest ways forward for Higher Education pedagogy.